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#1 2009-08-28 03:46:54

mjohnson
Member
Registered: 2009-08-14
Posts: 22

Font rendering in KDE 4

I recently installed Arch (switching from Ubuntu 8.10) and decided to give KDE a try.  So far I'm mostly happy, but the font rendering isn't working so well.  There are two problems: the first is that fonts all look too thin.  The second is that most of them are way too big!  (For some reason they render properly in some places, like some sites online [e.g. Gmail], but they're way off in most applications.)

I've tried the suggestions under "LCD" packages from the Arch fonts wiki, along with this guy's suggestions for setting up fontconfig.  I've also tried (variously) changing my DPI settings for KDM and System Settings -> Appearance -> Fonts (with aliasing anti-aliasing enabled or with system settings, and forcing the DPI to 120 or disabled).

Oh, and I have a 15.4" widescreen 1680x1050 LCD monitor, which I think is (supposed to be) 129 DPI.

What can I do to get fonts to look the way they should?

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#2 2009-08-28 06:16:37

hunterthomson
Member
Registered: 2008-06-22
Posts: 794
Website

Re: Font rendering in KDE 4

mjohnson wrote:

I recently installed Arch (switching from Ubuntu 8.10) and decided to give KDE a try.  So far I'm mostly happy, but the font rendering isn't working so well.  There are two problems: the first is that fonts all look too thin.  The second is that most of them are way too big!  (For some reason they render properly in some places, like some sites online [e.g. Gmail], but they're way off in most applications.)

I've tried the suggestions under "LCD" packages from the Arch fonts wiki, along with this guy's suggestions for setting up fontconfig.  I've also tried (variously) changing my DPI settings for KDM and System Settings -> Appearance -> Fonts (with aliasing anti-aliasing enabled or with system settings, and forcing the DPI to 120 or disabled).

Oh, and I have a 15.4" widescreen 1680x1050 LCD monitor, which I think is (supposed to be) 129 DPI.

What can I do to get fonts to look the way they should?

OK, you problem is not with KDE. This weirded me out when I moved to Archlinux from Ubuntu too. In Archlinux you have to install all the fonts you want to use. The default fonts suck. So, You just need to install better fonts. You want the TrueType Fonts "ttf". You can install them with    pacman

Try this to list all the font packages available.

sudo pacman -Ss font

These are some ones that are good

ttf-dejavu
ttf-freefont
ttf-liberation

you instal them you just do...

sudo pacman -S ttf-liberation ttf-freefont ttf-dejavu

Then you will want to open up the Konfiguration thing that you change the KDE configurations settings in and then change the fonts in there.

Last edited by hunterthomson (2009-08-28 06:19:23)


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#3 2009-08-28 12:56:11

mjohnson
Member
Registered: 2009-08-14
Posts: 22

Re: Font rendering in KDE 4

hunterthomson wrote:

OK, you problem is not with KDE. This weirded me out when I moved to Archlinux from Ubuntu too. In Archlinux you have to install all the fonts you want to use. The default fonts suck. So, You just need to install better fonts. You want the TrueType Fonts "ttf". You can install them with    pacman

Try this to list all the font packages available.

sudo pacman -Ss font

These are some ones that are good

ttf-dejavu
ttf-freefont
ttf-liberation

you instal them you just do...

sudo pacman -S ttf-liberation ttf-freefont ttf-dejavu

Then you will want to open up the Konfiguration thing that you change the KDE configurations settings in and then change the fonts in there.

Thanks for the tip!  I installed those (and a few others), and I definitely like (for instance) FreeSans better than the default Sans that most everything was using.  Most things look better; I think I'm going to have to tweak the hinting a bit still, but this is definitely an improvement.  Many of the things I thought were rendering related were actually just bad fonts, like you said. smile

There are just a couple of problems remaining that I'm hoping will be just as easy to conquer...  First, some websites are still rendering horribly.  Take a look at this screenshot of this site, followed by this one:
rideuta.png
Board-text.png
At first I figured it was a problem with Firefox (I know GTK doesn't always play nicely with KDE), but it looks the same in Konqueror.  A quick peek at the HTML for the first seems to say that it's asking for Verdana, Arial, or Helvetica...and I have Verdana and Arial installed.  (The second one calls for a ridiculous font, Palatino Linotype, which I don't have.)  Either way, though, the pages look totally wrong (the font is much too large) compared to any other machine I've seen it on (even my previous Ubuntu setup).   Does anyone know what's going on?

One other example of font size weirdness: the digital clock plasmoid.  Here's what it looks like:
digital-clock-plasmoid.png
The odd thing is that it looked like this for a while when I first installed Arch and KDE, and then played nicely for a few days...and now it's back to looking ugly.

And finally, here are my font settings in System Settings:
font-settings.png
(And yes, I've rebooted since installing the new fonts and changing font settings, just in case.)

Any more ideas? smile

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#4 2009-08-28 14:16:23

bearbonez
Member
Registered: 2009-07-07
Posts: 6

Re: Font rendering in KDE 4

In firefox > Preferences, untick "let webpages use their own fonts" wink


genius in irc "ah the first Archlinux install, I remember it well, it's like starting to read a really good book"

To find yourself, think for yourself © Socrates 469 BC

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#5 2009-08-28 19:10:19

Teoulas
Member
From: Athens, Greece
Registered: 2009-03-21
Posts: 70

Re: Font rendering in KDE 4

You should definitely change the DPI setting. Most monitors are close to 96 DPI (the Windows default). Higher settings will make the fonts larger, because more DPI means more pixels on a given area. Firefox has its own DPI setting (see this and this) so you may need to change it as well.

On the second site, Palatino Linotype is a Windows serif font and it gets replaced by a larger serif font. Here's how it looks on my monitor (24" - 1920x1200; very close to 96 DPI):
fontu.png

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#6 2009-08-28 20:06:16

attila
Member
Registered: 2006-11-14
Posts: 293

Re: Font rendering in KDE 4

mjohnson wrote:

Oh, and I have a 15.4" widescreen 1680x1050 LCD monitor, which I think is (supposed to be) 129 DPI.

Let the xserver do the job to find out your dpi. Here be my settings for my monitor:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "NEC2190"
    HorizSync   31.5-91.1
    VertRefresh 50-85
    Option      "CalcAlgorithm" "CheckDesktopGeometry"
    DisplaySize 432 324
EndSection

You can find your DisplaySize in the manual oder mess it up.

mjohnson wrote:

What can I do to get fonts to look the way they should?

You have to have attenion that even if you change something in the kde systemcontrol for the fonts there get created a ~/.fonts.conf. Delete it to avoid side effects.

If you can look into a ubuntu installation than compare the content of /etc/fonts/conf.d and if it is the same but in arch not so good compare the contents of the files too. I think Ubuntu could have some better standards out of the box but if you do the same it should look in the same way.

Note: I don't use the "LCD" packages so perhaps this acts in another way. This has nothing to do with the packages but i'm satisfied with the normal packages and so i never tried them.

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#7 2009-08-28 20:45:14

Gen2ly
Member
From: Sevierville, TN
Registered: 2009-03-06
Posts: 1,529
Website

Re: Font rendering in KDE 4

Teoulas wrote:

You should definitely change the DPI setting. Most monitors are close to 96 DPI (the Windows default). Higher settings will make the fonts larger, because more DPI means more pixels on a given area. Firefox has its own DPI setting (see this and this) so you may need to change it as well...

Not true.  DPI's very wildly.  Check out this page if you want to learn more.  MS fonts don't look too good either without a good deal of hacking (or a good DPI).  I personally like liberation fonts instead and replace the ms fonts with them.  I put the liberation font substitution on liberation font page in AUR

Last edited by Gen2ly (2009-08-28 20:45:41)


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